Working Papers and Chapters

An ongoing debate in employment policy is whether promoting small and medium enterprises creates more employment. Do small enterprises generate more employment growth than larger firms? We use the elimination of small-scale industry (SSI) promotion in India to address this question. For 60 years, SSI promotion in India focused on reserving certain products for manufacture by small and medium establishments. We identify the consequences for employment growth, investment, output, productivity, and wages of dismantling India’s SSI reservations. We exploit variation in the timing of de-reservation across products; our identification strategy is also robust to measuring the long-run impact of national SSI policy changes using variation in pre-treatment exposure at the district level, and to co...

The new trade theory emphasizes the role of market-share reallocations across firms ("stealing") in driving productivity growth, while the older literature focused on average productivity improvements ("learning"). We use comprehensive, firm-level data from India's organized manufacturing sector to show that market-share reallocations did play an important role in aggregate productivity gains immediately following the start of India's trade reforms in 1991. However, aggregate productivity gains during the overall 20-year period from 1985 to 2004 were driven largely by improvements in average productivity. By exploiting the variation in reforms across industries, we document that the average productivity increases can be attributed to India's trade liberalization and FDI reforms. Finally, w...

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